Previously I blogged about the QR Server, my first port of call whenever I need to debug FAST. At that stage I ask the question “What does FAST know about this document?” and the QR Server is the best place to start looking.

Sometimes, the information in the QR Server isn’t enough to figure out what’s going wrong. If that’s the case, my next question is usually “What is FAST told about this document?”

As part of this process it is critical to understand the difference between Crawled & Managed Properties.

A Crawled Property is something that is fed into the FAST document processing engine. It may or may not decide to index and keep what it finds. If the information it does is not ignored it will end up in the Full Text index, a Managed Property, or both. Crawled Properties à What FAST is told, Managed Properties à What FAST knows and has decided to keep.

While the QR Server is for managed properties, you use a tool called FFDDumper to inspect crawled properties.

The debugging process for using the FFDDumper goes like this:

Enable the FFDDumper & reset your document processors

Mark an individual document for being re-crawled

Start an incremental crawl

Inspect the generated FFD files

Turn off the FFDDumper and reset your document processors

Enabling the FFDDump

There is a file in your FAST installation folder called optionalprocessing.xml (found under %FASTSEARCH%\etc\config_data\DocumentProcessor\). This file is for configuring optional processing pipelines (duh!).

Find the element that looks like the one below and set it to yes.

<processor name=”FFDDumper” active=”yes” />

THIS WILL SLOW DOWN YOUR SERVER AND GOBBLE DISK SPACE! Use this for temporary debugging only, and really, only use it for incremental crawls or else the sheer volume of data will make it very difficult to find what you want.

Reset your processing pipelines from the FAST PowerShell console with a

> psctrl reset

Marking a document for re-crawl

In SharePoint navigate to your FAST Content Service Application and mark a single document for a re-crawl. Alternatively, make a small change to a document (make sure the document is published).

Kick off an incremental crawl by going to the context menu of your Content Source.

Inspecting the generated FFD Files

If you navigate to %FASTSEARCH%\data\ffd you’ll find one or more folders. Go to the newest folder and look inside. There should be a few .ffd files, one of which will contain the ssic of your document (you can get this from the QR server).

Each line from the FFDDumper will look something like the following:

The format of each line includes:

Length of property identifier & name

Property identifier (may be a GUID)

Property name

Variant Type

Length of the property value (often preceded by an ‘s’)

The property value

Only lines with GUIDs are available to be mapped into Managed Properties. Lines without GUIDs are internal to FAST and are not accessible. If you look at the screenshot below, the unfortunate implication is that you can’t write your own pipeline extension to run against the raw crawled data.

Reset the FFDDump

Once you’re done, reset the FFD Dump to its regular configuration

<processor name=”FFDDumper” active=”no” />

Finally, run a psctrl reset to load the updated settings of optionalprocessing.xml

I’ve recently created a new SharePoint site collection but was missing the FAST features out of the Site Collection Settings. I had a site collection within the same Web Application where the features were present and so was very confused. I already had added myself to the FASTSearchAdministrators and the FASTSearchKeywordAdministrators groups on my FAST server which can also keep the FAST options hidden, and besides, I already had them visible elsewhere.

There were no obvious features to activate within the Site Collection features, and I had standard, enterprise & publishing features enabled. Noting the url of one of the pages in the working site collection I tried loading it up in the broken one. For example:

site/workingSC/_layouts/contextualkeywordmanagement.aspx

site/brokenSC/_layouts/contextualkeywordmanagement.aspx

At this point I got the standard SharePoint error popup with the message FAST Search site collection features are not activated. Pretty obvious what’s going on, the feature isn’t activated and there’ s no obvious way to do so via the UI.

Finding the Feature GUID

Digging through the API using Reflector reveals this method which any reasonable developer can infer will give you the error message above.

Ever got this helpful message when trying to configure the user profile to use a termset?

There was a problem retrieving data for this field. Updating values in this field is disabled temporarily. You can still update values in other fields.

Love it!

There are lots of potential causes for this. Earlier today I found that my problem was caused by an issue outlined on Donal Colon’s blog.

Here’s my setup:

Managed metadata started, configured and running as the only MM Service in my farm

MM service was associated with all web apps

User profile service was configured correctly (I could do profile syncing) and could even associate fields with a Managed Metadata term.

However, with all these things, I wasn’t feeling any User Profile / Managed Metadata love. This was potentially a big problem as I have a client delivery counting on User Contexts in Search (depending upon said UP/MM love).

Enter Donal Colon.

His post suggests that if you don’t tick the default storage location for keywords when you have TWO MM services then you can get problems like the one I encountered. He also highlighted that having two MM services conflicting can cause a problem.

Well, I only had one Managed Metadata service, but if you don’t have this box ticked, then you aren’t getting any terms in your User Profile Service either.

Most of the examples of using dialogs in SharePoint refer to calling other pages, effectively creating a popup iframe. This approach is both useful and reasonably well documented (Charlie Holland’s blog has the best examples I’ve seen to date).

What isn’t well documented is using SharePoint modal dialogs to render dynamically generated html. When you call SP.UI.ModalDialog.ShowModalDialog you need to pass in a SP.UI.DialogOptions object. Charlie kindly posted the list onto MSDN, but with regards to passing in html it’s incorrect. It seems to indicate that raw html can be passed in.

This is because the string that gets passed in is evaluated for nodeType (if you want to check for yourself, see around line 764 in SP.UI.Dialog.debug.js, there is a function that the html string is passed into with a definition that looks like $13_0: function($p0).

In SharePoint 2010 default masterpage (v4.master) has delivered Breadcrumbs in a new, and I think confusing, way.

SharePoint 2010 Breadcrumb

From my perspective, this approach is difficult to use because it is hidden from the user. Once you know about it the breadcrumb is easier to find, but its nowhere near as usable as a traditional breadcrumb.

Smashing Magazine offers a range of alternatives you can consider in implementing your own breadcrumb which are worth considering if you want to create a fully-customised master page.

However, want if you want a breadcrumb of the same style as SP2007?

What if you want to revert the 2010 breadcrumb into the style of the 2007 breadcrumb? Well it turns out that the v3 masterpage(the 2007-style masterpage that runs on SharePoint 2010 to allow companies to avoid a visual upgrade) runs the old-school masterpage.

If you dive into the v3 masterpage (default.master) you can see the following snippet to in place of the breadcrumbs.

As it turns out, if you paste that snippet into the v4 masterpage it will work perfectly.

Update: Turns out it won’t work perfectly, but its pretty good. There are a number of circumstances (i.e. site settings page) where it falls short, but for most users its better than nothing. To have a perfect breadcrumb, unfortunately you’ll need to open up visual studio.